


Excerpt from The Red Glade Peacemakers

by qwanderer



Series: Glimpses of the Half-Dragon Universe [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Domestic Violence, Dragons, F/M, Gen, Objectification, half-dragons, talking through issues of sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 03:58:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6222772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was silent for a moment, watching him. Then, “You understand that you have to give her space, Khislon? Give her time. And even then, she’s certainly not a sure thing. She’s her own person. And it’s good that you’re starting to question your assumptions, because I have a feeling there are a lot of them that Ezri wouldn’t like.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Excerpt from The Red Glade Peacemakers

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, dear readers! For those of you who have enjoyed my work, I wanted to let you know the good news! My first novel is now available! You can find more information about it [here!](http://irenewendywode.tumblr.com/post/140873573316/its-here-the-red-glade-peacemakers-is-now)

 

Isis was a patient teacher, and Khislon knew it. He knew that she wasn’t like anyone else here, that she wouldn’t hold it against him if he asked the wrong question or mentioned the wrong thing. But he still found it hard to break the habits of a lifetime.

After a long and seemingly pointless, monotonous lesson, Khis found himself struggling to hold back the question, “Why are we doing this?”

Isis just looked at him for a moment, unsurprised, exasperated. “Why didn’t you ask sooner?” she questioned, fighting to keep the whiny note out of her tone that was threatening to creep in.

“I trust you,” Khislon answered. “Your lessons don’t always make sense to me, but there’s always a point.”

“And if there isn’t?”

“There must be a reason, at least.” He shrugged, a little bit of his self-pitying look on his face. “You enjoy watching me make a fool of myself?”

“No, I really don’t.” Briefly, she wondered if the opposite were true, if he got something out of being seen as foolish or awkward. Well, either way, she was determined to teach him to reach for something else.

“So why?” he asked.

“To see how long it would take you to ask.”

He looked a little bewildered, a little hurt, but he didn’t protest.

“Why did you wait so long? Why do you hesitate so often?” Isis asked him. “Why isn’t it natural for you to ask questions of your teachers when you don’t understand the lesson?” 

“I don’t want to be rude,” he said, citing the excuse that was becoming common between the two of them.

“It matters so much?” she asked. “It’s more important to you than learning the lesson, understanding the hows and whys of a warrior’s life?”

Khislon shrugged and stared at the floor. “I don’t know, I just want to get things right. I don’t like what happens when I say or do the wrong thing.”

Isis looked incredibly unhappy. “If you hesitate by nature, you’ll hesitate on the battlefield. If you hesitate on the battlefield, you’ll like the results even less.”

“I know.” Khislon sighed. “But I can’t help wanting to get things right. How can I move if I don’t know where I’m going yet? And I feel like if I can just do exactly what I’m supposed to, I’ll get by without a scratch.”

“This from a warrior!?” Isis nearly laughed aloud. “Tell me something, my boy, do you honestly believe you can win a battle without being wounded?”

“No. But I haven’t gotten there yet. I’d like to get good enough to win without getting hit. The best warriors never get hit, or so the trainers used to tell us.”

“Yes, well, I’m your trainer now and I’ve been alive a long time and fought a lot of battles and I’ve got some news for you, little hatchling,” Isis said, and with that she pulled off the top of her sparring uniform.

 _All_ of it.

Khislon knew he should look away; he knew it wasn’t proper to stare at a female with just underwear on if you weren’t married to her. But he couldn’t help himself, and it certainly wasn’t the fact that she was topless that had him staring.

Isis’s torso was covered in scars. Nicks and cuts and several puncture wounds stood in many shades of pinks and browns on her dark skin. She had a thick, mean looking purple-brown scar that ran from her armpit to somewhere below her waist line. And a bullet wound had puckered angrily on her left shoulder.

“Faster healing than humans means worse scarring,” she reminded him. “But if you can get the right herbs, quickly enough, it helps a lot. Suffice to say I’ve been in a lot of scrapes where getting help was not easy.”

She really didn’t care about polite. Nothing else had managed to drive that lesson home, but this did. Before he could stop himself, Khislon felt his mouth moving.

“Where did the big one come from?”

There was a long hesitation before she spoke, and when she did, her voice was blunt but distant.

“My husband gave it to me.” Another memory, even less pleasant than the last. This place, this boy, seemed determined to drag them out of her.

Well, as long as the sharing dragged the questions out of him, as well.

“Ms. Va… Isis.” Khislon stood dumbly for a minute. Then he asked another certainly inappropriate question. “Could you tell me what happened?”

He expected her to refuse. But she just moved to sit on the sandy floor. Her eyes engaged with his again, back in the room for the moment.

“Why do you want to know this?” she asked.

Khislon sat gingerly down beside her, letting his staff rest on his crossed knees, back against the wall. Not wanting to ask whether she was going to put her shirt back on. Feeling supremely awkward. But he had given up not feeling that way. Best to revel in it. Get something out of it.

“This will sound stupid, but… I feel like it will help me understand Ezri a little better. And you. You’re part of the clan now, why not try and understand… something about the people around me. Everyone else seems so confusing right now.”

She was silent for a moment, watching him. Then, “You understand that you have to give her space, Khislon? Give her time. And even then, she’s certainly not a sure thing. She’s her own person. And it’s good that you’re starting to question your assumptions, because I have a feeling there are a lot of them that Ezri wouldn’t like.”

Khis blinked at her. “I don’t… I try to be respectful. I know I’ve messed up.” Even his olive skin was showing a deep blush now, keeping his eyes firmly on her face. “I’m trying to do better.”

“Good,” said Isis, “but I’m not sure if you understand what exactly the problem was.”

“I looked….” He blushed even deeper. “I let my eyes wander.”

“Listen to me, Khis,” she said, “a breast is just a breast. They’re not meant to be secrets. They’re tools, like every part of the body. I used these to feed Ezri when she was a baby. That’s what they’re for. That’s what they mean to me. Now look at them, and tell me what you see.”

“But I….” He swallowed hard, and his face set in determination. “I won’t. It’s not right.”

“Why?” she asked. “Khislon, child, what do they mean to you?”

“I haven’t earned that. That’s… there are steps that come before something like that.”

“So they’re a reward, for completing some kind of courting obstacle course?” she asked.

Khis didn’t know how to answer that. It seemed to fit his idea pretty well, but when she said it like that, it sounded wrong.

“Well, they’re not, Khis. They’re just part of a body, part of a person. And when you set them up as a goal unto themselves, you’re either ignoring or devaluing the person who they’re part of. And that is the problem.”

Khis frowned, looking lost. “But I’ve always been taught that it’s respect to leave things private.”

Isis nodded. “That’s part of the culture you’ve been raised in. But respecting a person means respecting them first as a whole person, and respecting how they see themselves and how they want to be seen. The people you’ve known before might have all thought the way you do — you’ve been very sheltered, I think. It’s good to respect their privacy. But to me, my body is a tool, a very well-used one, and I don’t see anything wrong with taking it out to look at it, especially when I’m teaching. You can’t teach someone how to properly use a sword without ever unsheathing your blade.”

Khislon cleared his throat. “I don’t know if I can….” He trailed off, not knowing how to articulate this.

“You don’t know if you can examine every part of me and still respect me? Or you don’t know if you’ll learn anything when you’re distracted by my body? Because if it’s the former, get it over with, find out, and if you can’t? Then get out of the lives of me and my daughter right now. But if it’s the latter? Take a good look. Get used to it. Because it’s not only a weakness when training, it’s a weakness when fighting, being that distractable. And a weakness in every other aspect of life, as you’ve had reason to know.”

Khis felt as if there had to be some dark, heavy consequence for something that he’d been warned against so strongly, but he did it anyway, looking at the parts of Isis’s body that his eyes had skittered away from before, even as the multitude of scars had held his gaze.

It was at once frightening and fascinating, but it was almost disappointing how right she was. They were brown and scarred, like the rest of her skin, and it was partly her attitude towards them, her complete lack of either embarrassment or flirtation as he gazed at them, that allowed him to see them eventually as what they were, no more, and no less. A functional body part, one piece of a functional half-dragon body.

His eyes moved back to the broad, ugly scar across her torso.

“You don’t have to tell me. I don’t want to pry,” he said. “I thought… it didn’t seem like I should ask, but I’ve kind of lost all idea of what you’d consider private?” He grimaced a little bit.

“Asking is a good way to find out,” said Isis with a dry smile. “In some ways it’s one of my many war stories, depending on how you define war. But, in any case, I tend to think of war as a very personal thing.”

Khis shook his head. “That’s okay. I learned a lot already. Thank you.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t tell you. I just want you to know that it’s something more private than I generally share with my students,” she said. “And it didn’t happen in a vacuum, either. It had as much to do with what kind of relationship we already had as it had to do with what actually happened that day. Meronteth and I… well, as much as he thought he loved me, when we got married, we expected different things. I wanted to get away from all the customs of the Movrekt that I hated. He just wanted to get out from under his brother’s thumb. There were a lot of things that he took for granted that I wasn’t interested in. And in the end, what it came down to was that he wanted to control me more than he loved me for who I was. So, Ezri and I, we’re both… very careful about those things now.”

“Well, he was Movrekt,” Khislon began.

Isis shook her head. “I was Movrekt for a long time, too,” she insisted. “Every culture has its good and its bad. Every culture has a set of unnecessary assumptions it makes. Movrekt doesn’t mean evil, and neither Darkhan nor Red Glade always means good.” She laid her hand on one of his. “Khis, it is never too late to escape the boundaries your culture has placed around you.”

“You both see me like you see him, don’t you,” Khislon said, beginning to be agitated.

“In many ways, yes,” said Isis. “I always believed that Meronteth truly wanted to be good, but couldn’t quite figure out how. If I didn’t believe in that potential, even at the worst moments — _especially_ at the worst moments — I wouldn’t have stayed with him. It takes a lot for me to give up on someone, because I’ve devoted myself to healing, no matter what the cost. Ezri, I encourage to protect herself, because she doesn’t yet have that kind of devotion, and I’d like her to get hurt as little as possible as she finds her way in the world.”

“I don’t want to be compared to….” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry. You loved him?”

“We both did. And he loved us. Only… not quite in the healthiest way.”

“What happened?” he asked, listening intently.

Isis gained a faraway quality to her gaze as she dredged up the memories in more depth. “Meronteth loved to hunt. He was a dragon, through and through, and he felt more comfortable in scales and wings than he ever did in the skin of a mammal. He’d brought home a deer that day, and so I was making venison stew.” She laughed a little, self-deprecating. “I don’t just know bodies from putting them back together. I’m a fair hand at taking them apart, as well.”

It didn’t please her to admit it, and the subject at hand clearly weighed on her. She sighed, then continued. “A hunt usually settled him, but not that day. I could hear tension in his steps, smell anger on him before he came into the kitchen.

“He’d seen my bags where I’d set them out in the hall, and he wasn’t happy. Things had been tense since I’d started working again. I joked around a bit, talked about how he could spend time with Ezri while I was gone, did what I could to remind him what we both had in our little family that we were proud of, that we both valued, but truth be told, that was little enough. He could never wrap his mind around the ideals I’d dedicated my life to.”

“He didn’t like you healing up humans,” Khislon said.

“He was Movrekt still, more than I’d realized; he’d spent so much time at Nash’s side. But he didn’t see the humans as sheep, not the way Nash does. He saw humans kill plenty of his kind over the centuries. He saw them for wolves. When a wolf takes enough of your cattle you hunt them down, as many as you can. And there I was healing the wolves.” The corner of her mouth twisted in a joyless smile. “Basically, a conservationist married to a well-armed rancher. It didn’t make sense to him. Especially since his biggest fear was that I could get killed by one of the wolves I was healing.”

“He did care about you, then.” Khislon seemed puzzled. “But if he thought that way about humans… about what you do….”

“A person doesn’t have to lack dysfunction to care for someone else, Khislon. Or love someone else. Meronteth, he had already walked away from a lot to be with me, lost other things before that. Some of his siblings, his and Nash’s siblings, were killed by humans too. Think about that. The war took a lot away from him. The life he had before was slipping away. The world was changing and he needed somewhere to belong. He tried to let go of a lot to be with me, to share a life with me. I… was not enough. I couldn’t have been. Because I wasn’t the problem. Anyway….”

She took a deep breath and went on.

“I told him there was a new spell I wanted to try out. That it might help break physical addiction. That wasn’t good, of course. For a long time, drug trade has been a major source of income for the Movrekt. For his brother, his people. He told me to leave off, to stop trying to fix things for the humans.

“Well, I wasn’t going to abandon the sick. There were people there dying, poisoned. I had a duty. But he couldn’t see that, had been on the Movrekt side too long to recognize that the way they manipulate humans is wrong. He brought up all the old arguments, of course. ‘You told me the Red Glade would be neutral. Only defending ourselves or stepping in if the Treaty was broken. What do you call this?’

“I was tired of pretending that his loyalty to Nash made sense to me. Fed up with holding my tongue. I wasn’t the only one who had something else in mind when we first married, when the Red Glade was created. I tried to put all my anger into the task in front of me, be satisfied with the snap of the carrots under my knife. But there was too much. And then I asked, ‘You don’t think they’re breaking the Treaty?’

“Before I knew it he’d slammed his hand down over mine. Trapping me. I can still feel the heat of his breath on the back of my neck. The force of the vibrations as he yelled. ‘This city belongs to my brother, do you understand? It is off limits!’

“He could get so angry. I’d seen it before on the sparring mats, and before that, of course, in the war. I’d forgotten. And never realized, until then, how little control he had over it. I couldn’t get my hand back, not without leaving him holding the knife. I tried to stay calm, I really did. But he kept yelling the most ridiculous things. Defending Nash, saying I insulted him by healing humans. Well, I couldn’t bear to be touching him after that. I yanked my hand back, even though it meant he kept the knife, but I socked him one on the jaw while I was at it.

“I couldn’t hold it in anymore. It was all too much. His stubbornness, his arrogance. I’d been angry at him before, but… that was the first time I realized that I could truly hate my husband.”

Isis shook, exhaling forcefully out through her nose.

“I don’t remember what I yelled. I do remember how his face changed when I said it. I hadn’t realized he could look any angrier than he already had.”

She fingered the thick ugly line across her belly, eyes wet. Khislon felt like he should do something, but he didn’t dare. She was the teacher; he was only a student.

“I remember red. I remember him with the knife in his hand, all of a sudden. I remember wondering when had all that red leaked out of his eyes and onto the knife, and then he was looking down at my chest, horrified instead of angry. I don’t remember falling.

“When I came to, Ezri was standing over me, all wide, teary eyes. I was so out of it that I asked her what was wrong. Of course she was upset. All she knew was that her mommy was bleeding, and her daddy wasn’t there.

“I woke up just enough to tell her we had to cast a spell. She was so brave. I can’t even imagine how difficult that must have been. Here is this tiny girl with two stubby little pigtails and a cartoon unicorn on her shirt — don’t ever let on I told you that by the way, she’d kill me — and she finds her mother bleeding to death on the floor. She was so brave, and when she did the chant, her voice didn’t wobble once. She knew how important it was. It’s almost funny now, she probably learned that steadiness from Meronteth’s sharpshooting lessons.

“We got through to the others of the Red Glade, and then all we could do was wait. Ezri went to get towels, and I had her lie on top of them to try and keep pressure. It hurt but it was more of a comfort than anything else would have been. The smell of her hair was so normal, so comfortable. I kissed the top of my baby’s head, told her everything would be fine, and I was down for the count.”

“Meronteth never returned, I take it?” Khislon asked.

Isis snorted; it was not as bitter as she expected.

“He ran straight to Nash. After that… no matter how things went, they could never have been the same.”

“Do you… hate him for doing that?”

Isis shook her head slowly.

“No. I hated him for other things. When I found out that he’d died I felt awful, realized there were good things about him, things I loved, things I was going to miss. Still do. But he was an idiot about people. He actually went into Nash’s office unarmed. Actually was that naive when it came to his brother. He thought the information he had on me and the Red Glade would be enough for Nash to take him back. Nash, as far as I know, embraced him, heard his words, smiled at him welcomingly of course, thanked him for the information, and shot him square in the face. Meronteth never understood how much it had hurt Nash that he left. That scar is one of the things that’s always twisted him up inside.”

Khislon felt like his head was spinning. Ezri’s cold demeanor, her strange empathy with the women around her, simultaneously present with her dark glares at just about any man — it was all making a sick, sad sense. “How old was Ezri when all this happened?” he asked.

Isis bit her lip, eyes misty.

“She was six years old. She worshiped her father. And he stabbed her mother in the gut, ran away, and betrayed her people. Can you imagine? I know I can’t.”

There was silence for a minute, Khislon shifted his legs in the sand of the floor to stretch them out. Isis wiped her eyes and began stashing the memory back wherever it was she’d pulled it out of. At the same time, she gathered up her shirt and clothed herself again. Then she turned and looked at the young warrior and gave him a surprisingly amused half smile.

“What?” Khislon asked. He looked suitably unsettled.

Isis snorted again, not unfriendly, though.

“Do you still want to date her?”

“… Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

Khis thought for longer this time. “Yes… if it’s what she wants. Having her not hate me would be a good start.”

“Then learn to be okay with the scars you receive. Because none of us can get through life without a few scars. It takes an understanding of failure and pain to understand people. If you don’t learn about them you’ll get yourself in trouble. The way Meronteth did.” She shook her head. “And never forget that Ezri is who she is, she does what she does for a reason, and if you truly value her, you’ll value those reasons, because if you don’t, you’ll find yourself facing one hell of a fight.” She examined him with a piercing half-glare. “Do you understand?”

Khis nodded slowly. “I think I have a lot to learn about how the two of you think,” he ventured.

“Take nothing for granted, Khis, not with this girl. Not a word, not a touch. Ask for everything, every step of the way. She loves deeply, but she _will not_ take your shit.” Isis’s expression softened a little, that slightly amused dry smile showing up again. “But realizing how much you don’t know,” she affirmed, “is always a good place to start.”


End file.
